Kirsten Flagstad was born on July 12th, 1895, and with this handsome boxed-set her centenary is celebrated very worthily by the company to whom she came for the last period of her career as a recording artist. A toast to the immortal memory has, in this context, to be coupled with another – to the producer, John Culshaw. He had the intelligence, devotion and energy, and also that extra gift of vision, to see that, at 60 and in retirement, Flagstad still had no need to renounce her association with the recording studios, and he won her for Decca. Thus in 1956 the most honoured singer of the age, formerly one of the jewels that made the Victor-HMV dynasty the crowned head of the record industry, passed at a crucial time to the British company that was their ever-more formidable rival. The discs have their place in the history of recording as well as in that of the great soprano.
Of course the Flagstad who sings here is not the Flagstad who so enthralled audiences at the Metropolitan when she made her debut there in 1935. She was then already 40 years old, but the voice had been wisely used and she was in her absolute prime. Twenty years later, the upper register had lost some resonance, if not power, and the topmost notes were no longer on call. The records (some more than others) show a layer of wear or impure overtones compromising somewhat the beauty of tone at a forte, though never affecting the lower notes. Otherwise, 'compromise' is the last word to use. Never, even remotely, is she heard to forfeit the utter steadiness of her voice; it is solid without a waver or so much as a false vibration. Her phrasing is as broad as ever and she never presses the pace so as to aid her breathing or spare her energy. Her intonation remains flawless, and if there was any diminution of volume it is scarcely detectable: the sound here has an easy amplitude supported by an unquestionable nobility of timbre.
A good place to begin sampling is at the start of Volume 4, the Schubert and Brahms Lieder. It opens with Schubert's Dem Unendlichen, massive and majestic in its first phrases. Here the voice of the 61-year-old singer has that immediate impact Culshaw says it had upon the orchestra and other singers present at her first session in the Rheingold recording under Solti – some of the younger singers had apparently wondered why the old woman was there, and now they knew! It is an astonishing sound, and perhaps still more impressive as it modulates, in the third, to a softer tone, exercising a style which is pure perfectly controlled legato. Then skip the Erlkonig, which comes next, and go on to the lovely Am Grabe Anselmos, with its complete change of manner, lighter tone, tender in expression and genuinely feeling the words (''dass ich dich verloren habe'', ''das ist mein Schmerz'').
Words are not usually the centre of interest in a Flagstad performance, and it was probably a good choice not to include the Hugo Wolf songs for this memorial album. Yet the Scandinavian songs seem to my linguistic ignorance to combine verbal and melodic felicity, and she catches particularly well the spontaneity of Grieg's Haugtussa cycle. I also love the orchestrally accompanied Grieg, and still more the Sibelius – where, however, the transfers reveal wear on the voice and present it as a less opulent sound than remembered from the LP (while, as against that, the Mahler recordings come out richer than I had remembered, with only the violins bearing traces of that acidity which was notable on the LP).
If it is a matter of selecting one or two discs rather than acquiring the whole set, then I rather think the Wagner operatic disc is the last I would go for: much is fine, but the Immolation scene, taken from the Norwegian Gotterdammerung recording, is at best a mixed pleasure, making one yearn to hear again some of the earlier versions such as the great 1948 recording with Furtwangler. Still, there is not much here that does not give pleasure. Always when listening it is only fair to recall that this is a woman (and a heroic Wagnerian soprano) in her sixties; but the necessity arises, not because we have to make allowances, but because she is still so good that it is possible to forget that she was once even better.
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